Marvin’s Room is about the struggle to keep going in the face of impending death. Naturally, it’s a comedy, and a remarkably gentle-natured one. Although the play grew out of the AIDS epidemic, playwright Scott McPherson opted to move the setting outside the gay community. A wise choice; the issues it raises about caretaking for … Read more
George Bernard Shaw didn’t shrink from a fight. The ardent socialist not only agitated for social change through his writings, but helped create the leftist movement that would become Britain’s Labour Party. Even in a career such as his, though, this comedy stands apart, because the profession in question was prostitution. Incredibly provocative when Shaw … Read more
Whew! One of the truisms of the theater business is, of course, that the show must go on—even after Jeune Lune’s incredible year. Their recent production of Hamlet was widely acclaimed to be the finest staging of Shakespeare this town has ever seen—which is saying something, given the Guthrie’s longtime stake on that turf. We … Read more
As part of their Saturday Midnight Movie series, the Uptown follows up Almodóvar’s Talk to Her with the first of his films with wide distribution outside Spain. 1988’s Verge is a black comedy about a woman whose lover has left and won’t tell her why. She tries to contact him throughout the day and ends … Read more
Matthew Barney’s experimental five-part series has become the toast of the museum crowd, while flying beneath the radar of the average moviegoer. You may have seen his name in the gossip columns, since he just had a child in September with Icelandic diva Bjork. (And you thought your mom and dad were weird.) Their couplehood … Read more
In 1952, nobody expected any staying power out of Singin’ in the Rain. In fact, it was thrown together hastily out of old songs to cash in on Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s previous An American in Paris. That’s why the movie is set in the early days of Hollywood—to go along with music that … Read more
Roman Polanski’s best movies—Rosemary’s Baby, Repulsion, Chinatown—are all about dread and mistrust. But up until now he’s never made a film about the part of his personal history that very likely caused that rare affinity with dark material, namely his childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War. He’s wanted to film it … Read more
Jean Luc-Godard’s biggest popular success has been praised in some quarters as the greatest European artwork of the 20th century. We wish we liked it that much. To us, the film’s narrative weaknesses overpower its good points, and what others call iconoclastic genius, we call stubborn mulishness. Still, warts and all, Godard changed the direction … Read more
Jennifer Aniston gets some kind of prize, perhaps a case of Turtle Wax, for being the first cast member of Friends to successfully anchor a drama on the big screen. Maybe it helps that Good Girl seems like a mild comedy on the surface. But there’s a shark under the waters. Director Miguel Arteta and … Read more
There are many ways to recognize a music snob, but probably the easiest is his insidious way of insisting that a band’s best work is invariably its earliest, least accessible stuff. In the case of New Order, of course, that early ouvre was Joy Division, the maudlin proto-gothic outfit from Manchester, England. We loved that … Read more